With the recent enactment of legislation such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002), public corporations are under increasing pressure to implement financial controls for ensuring compliance of corporate revenue generation processes with various governmental regulations and requirements. In general, the implementation of such financial controls, as well as validation processes for ensuring the effectiveness of the financial controls, requires management of enormous quantities of data associated with various aspects of the revenue generation process. Unfortunately, existing methods of validating financial controls are manually intensive. Furthermore, the existing methods of validating financial controls lack the capability to effectively test financial controls, and to measure the effectiveness of the financial controls, in order to prove compliance with applicable governmental regulations.
Accordingly, a need exists in the art for a method and apparatus for validating financial controls in order to prove compliance with governmental regulations respecting corporate revenue generation processes.